skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that something a lot of people who read this are forgetting (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that most of us have 4 year degrees and/or jobs in Software Engineering (or at least Engineering).

These courses are meant to be a segue into free courses offered online that people can use in lue of a 200k four year degree. While this form of education isn't there yet, it's use builds the reputation of these online courses.

If cheating runs rampant in the courses (more so than in person classes) it has a chance to negate the reputation of these sites. This could set back "free" education for years.

While I don't think that Cheaters should have an affect on what we can learn and take away from these classes, but it will have an affect on how much employers (like edw519) trust the courses. If they don't trust the online classes, then people who don't have a formal education won't be able to use these freely offered classes to raise their earning power.

It's sad how much a few bad apples can spoil.
The air pressure is proportional to either v or v² depending on the speed and atmosphere.

For a friction force Fr, the terminal velocity is reached when the acceleration becomes null:

mg + Fr = 0

mg - k* Vterm² = 0

k, the friction coefficient depends on different parameters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation

So in the end, the terminal velocity will depend on:

- The guy's weight (contrary to a free-fall's acceleration which is independent of mass)

- The "contact surface" between the body and the atmosphere.

- The atmosphere's density (which is lower than on Earth's surface).

The guy aims at reaching Mach 1. Note that due to the lower atmospheric pressure at this altitude, Mach 1 is a bit smaller than it is on the Earth's surface ( 301 m/s at 29 000 meters and -48 degrees C compared to 340 m/s at sea level ).

Finally, the term "free fall" is not appropriate as the definition of a free fall is "any motion of a body where its weight is the only force acting upon it."( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_fall ) This does not take into account the drag which is not negligible here.
I sent in answers to help with your survey, but I'm highly skeptical of the statistical methodology. You are selecting for people who at least think they know the answers. My prediction is that you are going to see a rosy picture of the state of CS knowledge among software developers, even though the reality is probably closer to the exact opposite.
At least in my university solutions to all past problems are posted anyway, we even have our own wiki for it. I imagine it's similar in other universities.

(fwiw, I use Github exactly in this way, only with public repos)
We (consumers) pay for all advertising.
Idempotent Infrastructure-as-a-Service
There's a huge difference between looking at pictures online and seeing the cars in person.
I'm taking a different Coursera course right now. I completed the first homework assignment on my own, but I would have loved to see how other people solved the problem. I definitely felt like I had some ugly hacks in my solution. Posting solutions online would be a great way for me to learn.

I'd recommend that they get rid of the certificate. There is no way to prove that 1) the person who took the course is who they say they are, and 2) they didn't cheat. Copying and pasting from a solution online is only one way to cheat. You could also have a friend finish the assignment. Maybe some day we can get past the point where education is simply a list of achievements, and more about who you have become as a person.
I like:

* that you built something. In a world full of talkers you're a doer! Kudos!

* I like the execution. I like the fact that you don't have to log in and can start creating a list right away.

I use emacs for pretty much everything (including todo lists) and I don't use any todo app (because I don't like switching out of emacs) so I'm not your target market. I wouldn't use this.

But please don't be discouraged, because not everyone is the same and there are people that would use this.

A couple of feature issues/feedback:

1. When I create a list and then come back to the page but forgot to save the link, I can't get back to my todo list. Maybe a way to know and save which lists I created would be great

2. If I create a list and go back and then try to create another one it doesn't add items. Maybe a bug?

Lastly keep plugging away. Even if you don't monetize this particular thing you're going to come across other problems that people will pay for. Ex: A todo list that allows you to add tasks and people that should do them and then tracks/nags that person to do it.

Good work. Keep going and thanks for sharing.
Much like I wouldn't hire a Stanford CS grad based on her certificate, I would recommend not hiring a Coursera "grad" based on a certificate either.
Canadian Startup Tapstream Answering Questions Mobile Developers are Asking
Ditto and 100% agreed!
It'll make you cool.
>"Perking up" when another person's uncomfortable emotions come to the fore and steering the conversation away teaches them that their problems are their own, and that their full selves are excluded while a partial self (with unpleasantness filtered out) is welcome.

I suspect that the author meant this in non-intimate situations, however I agree with your general trend of reasoning.
These types of people are comforting to the extreme, I would assume that would (technically) make them satisfying friends and lovers. I'd love to see a clarification of your use of unsatisfying here.
Probably the worst thing you could do to this app is collect a bunch of features from us and start implementing them -- if you do that you'll probably add priority, user assignment, better authentication, sub-tasks and eventually be like the 1000 other shared to-do lists. If this is the direction you think is best -- probably it would be better to abandon this idea.

A different way is to keep doubling down on what you have --find a use-case where your perspective is required and all of those other things are not -- move very quickly along that vector until you have something that might not even be described as a shared to-do list.

Here's an idea of what I mean. This site seems well suited to ad-hoc teams, probably distributed (not sharing an intranet for example), informal, low-security conscious -- meaning their data is either public or they don't care if it becomes public. Perhaps short-lived -- definitely unregulated.

For this -- I'd consider to-do lists to be done -- what else does this team need? Apply your template (easy sharing, minimal, etc) to those: wiki, document store, schedule. But, always, always do it in the style you have here or even a more radical version of it (if possible). If no one wants that, then consider that there's no market for this.

But before doing any of this, I'd start measuring engagement and then getting yourself in front of the highly engaged and figuring out what they are doing -- you learn a lot more talking to consumers (those that are consuming the product) than people like us.

As for monetization -- ad-hoc teams will be hard to get money from, but a SaaS style subscription for repeat users would be the standard way, I think. To-do list is free, but other tools are an additional cost.
It's not an either/or, but having some Rails experience will open up a lot of good opportunities to you. The kind of people you want to be working for are likely to be looking for Rails developers. There are of course lots of good PHP jobs out there, but you've got to wade through a lot of real stinkers to find them.
There is a Smalltalk implementation in Factor

http://factor-language.blogspot.in/2009/04/sup-dawg-we-heard...

Also from that page,

"If you want to experiment with language design but don't want to spend five years implementing a language like we did, you should consider using an existing system to host your language on, and Factor is one of several great choices in this regard." - Slava Pestov, Creator of Factor
Closing off a large number of people because they lack "sophistication" is called facism

No Fascism is an authoritative, nationalistic, militaristic, socially conservative political ideaology.
Has there been paper, or for that matter a blog-post with a napkin calculation, on the cost-benefit of a proper password/authorization system versus a non-robust system discounted for reputation loss / legal liability for system compromises? I did a few google queries but came up empty. I think this would make for a great PSA.
>If memory usage is so much higher than CPU usage, I have to wonder what it is that Mozilla is doing wrong with their architecture. Are they using pre-fork-style servers? Are they just provisioning poorly? What is it?

Or are they just serving up web pages to users? That's RAM and bandwidth heavy, but very CPU light. You still need the machines to scale your load, but you're not going to be using the CPU.

Realistically, for just about any application, you're going to be RAM-bound before you're CPU-bound. The exceptions are(off the top of my head) scientific computing and video rendering, both of which are CPU heavy, and are very deterministic in their behaviors, which allows for heavy optimization of L2 and L3 cache misses.
Neat for a demo/concept, but what's the purpose?

The web version of Google maps is already more powerful. No directions, layers, no streetview, no auto-matching, no reviews etc. Loads slower. How is this nicer than the web version by google (other than the obvious, ie lack of a URL field)

If you haven't in a while, look at the latest google web version they've made some changes, e.g. look up Brooklyn Bridge, NY.

Am I missing something?
I think the case you cited is the citation you are looking for.

The problem with that case is in the definition of operating in good faith. If the farmer did not attempt to cause his crop to be cross pollinated with Monsanto seed then it's not his fault that was the result. He may have known what he was doing and took advantage of the situation, but that's irrelevant. Unless it could be proven that he somehow obtained the seed from outside his crop without going through proper channels then he did nothing wrong. He claimed to have replanted seed from his own crop and I don't see where Monsanto proved otherwise. Again, the case you cite is the citation you are looking for.

Granted, I don't believe that Monsanto purchased the land around his farm with the intent to infect his crop with their seed, but the outcome is the same.

The court gave Monsanto license to claim all crops cross-pollinated with their seed as being property of Monsanto. In this case, the court was wrong.
"Ok program scala"

Yeah that sounds like a great interview. How long do you let them go, half an hour, a day? Do you think you can adequately judge someones abilities like this?
Longer thrust would not be equivalent to bigger thrusts for non vertical paths, neither the arrival time or vectors once there. That's probably related.

I can also imagine that even the weight profile will change, thus leading to different paths...
#Activist: A timeline of online activism and slacktivism
The new design is really great and in many ways better than GitHub’s. Now people unfamiliar with the services might actually be able to find a download button for once.

Another place where GitHub is really dropping the ball is in the social aspect of their service with terrible activity feeds I can’t believe anyone actually uses. I wrote a rant about it here: http://pygm.us/uGhNdcGU.

There are many, many ways Bitbucket can beat—and beats—GitHub, so this new design makes me a lot more optimistic about the continuing competition between the two and the improvements this will result in on both sides.

I will say that I’m not sure whether I like a grey as dark as the one you use in your new design, though. :)
No native code? Excellent, I don't have to worry about whether an app will run on my device or not.
NSQ: realtime distributed message processing at scale
/that's the joke.mcbain.jpg
If thats the access pattern, couldn't they just use tape? Of course you can't easily bootstrap an automated warehouse for these things, but once you have it, you enjoy the drastically lower prices and better availability of tape.

(I know nothing about using tapes to seriously store data, so this is conjecture.)
Having the mindset that the mere existence of bugs constitutes a personal or professional failure is probably very unhealthy. Is this something developers experience? I've never felt bad about a bug before. I just go and fix it. No pain, just gain.

Breaking things and inconveniencing others are a much bigger drag for me. Those are the problems I stay late at work to solve.
I think this question could be split up and/or more detailed.

Example:
What tools do you use to pitch investors? (keynote, powerpoint)

What tools do you use to help you pitch to investors and mangage feedback?

What tools do you use to connect with investors to pitch to?

What tools do you use to create a profile so investors can see your pitch?
Only require ID for the recognition. If you detect cheating, don't do anything about it until they confirm their ID to get their certification.
While I like the idea of cleaning up unrelated activities I don't think observers or subscribers are an ideal solution. In a system of non trivial size, or even a system where you haven't worked in a particular model for a while it can become difficult to track down what is acting and when.

When you need to bundle activity together a much better approach is to move it out of the controller and into a dedicated class. It isn't practical to test a controller in isolation, but quite simple to test a PORO.

When you extract the activities into a class you are forced to name the behavior outside the context of some controllers "create" action. Testing, readability, and complexity wins.
What a stupid, overly defensive sentiment.

That's like using free speech as a motivation to tell your boss to "Go fuck himself"
Communicate more easily across languages in Gmail | Official Gmail Blog
I have a very intelligent friend who try as he might cannot learn programming. He has interests all over the academic board and teaches two unrelated courses. I think I understand now why he cannot. He's an eternal optimist. I tell him he's selectively ADD about programming, but maybe he's just allergic to the negativity of it all.
This is an awesome project and has fostered some great seed-stage projects. It's a key part of the ecosystem that's putting Montreal on the world stage for tech startups.
Doesn't that fit under 'authoritative'?
Looks like the screw is on the ground in the bottom of the picture. Circled in the original of this comment thread.
Firefox 16 live: Here's What's New
This brings up an interesting concept. All great creators (artists, programmers, woodworkers, hairdressers, etc) tend to be more pessimistic than optimistic. If you attitude is "Wow this program I wrote is totally awesome, I deserve a pat on the back", then you'll never improve upon your program and you'll end up never improving your skills and will end up a rosh katan[1]. You have to be the kind of person who sees each of your creation in a constant state of less than perfect in order for you to act upon making it better.

Interestingly enough, people on the other end of the spectrum (sales people, executives, marketing people, etc) have to be the opposite. You can't have any doubts about the awesomeness of the product. Doing so would be counterproductive.

[1]http://www.danappleman.com/index.php?p=31
Instead of submitting yet another bug report, you should totally submit a "bug" that is nothing but positive feedback.

A truly good product will have fans sending in messages and talking about the things they love -- make sure these comments make it to the developers too!
Didn't this launch 2 years ago at Techcrunch Disrupt NYC?
One of the hints for assignment 2 is:

"Most of the solutions for this assignment can be written as one-liners. If you have more, you probably need to rethink your solution. In other words, this assignment needs more thinking (whiteboard, pen and paper) than coding ;-)."

Is it not entirely possible that they're getting some false positives?
? ... People don't have to die for things to be tragic. I still don't see why this is on HN.
It sounds like a plateau, where he's not getting noticeably better from the mistakes he's making (so that he's not making them as much with each chunk of code he writes). Maybe this happens when you're close to your full potential?
Firefox debuts new developer toolbar
Examplifier: Turn bland source code into interactive demos
Agreed. I am surprised we don't see this more actually. A good PhD advisor can make a world of difference if s/he is working with a good student. Also, you maintain that connection throughout your career and tend to work together (even if informally). Seems like Rabi knew what he was doing.
I think one way to help fix this negative feedback loop is to use the advice of the Harvard Business Review's article "How Customers Can Rally Your Troops" (src: http://hbr.org/2011/06/how-customers-can-rally-your-troops/a... ). The premise is that consistently showing your employees proof of the positive effects your organization's products produce for end-users can drastically improve motivation. I just linked to the abstract, but the full article goes into the dramatic effects this technique had on a university fundraising call center (a job with constant negative reinforcement).
Am I the only one who thinks it looks exactly like Github?
He can't be that intelligent if he is externally optimistic about everything. Part of being smart makes you aware of the negatives of everything.
TLDR: write better code

functional programmers get to express their ideas as code

imperative programmers are so busy playing whack-a-mole with their bugs that they don't have time to think about new ideas

just look at the research[1] coming out of the <del>Clojure</del> functional programming community - especially Datomic. once you learn how to get your defect rate under control, you have time to explore crazy awesome new ideas

[1] https://thestrangeloop.com/archive/2011
[1] https://thestrangeloop.com/archive/2012

edited
This is awfully melodramatic drivel. If you don't like what you are doing then stop doing it.
please also upvote on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/
> Or are they just serving up web pages to users? That's RAM and bandwidth heavy, but very CPU light. You still need the machines to scale your load, but you're not going to be using the CPU.

That depends very much on the efficiency of software your architecture. A well-architected web app can scale up RAM and CPU utilization much more closely than something modeled on zero shared state independent processes.

Additionally, even if your scaling model of RAM before CPU is the only possible one, that doesn't make the utilization effecient, and implies that higher efficiency could still be reached by scaling up RAM per machine.
Considering that the Coursera certificates require you to take a class (usually taught by experts in the respective field) as opposed to cramming for a certification exam, I'd say it's a good bit more valuable.

I took the first AI class last Fall, and if you've never been exposed to the material, it was a very good survey of Artificial Intelligence.
A few thoughts on making $$$.

1. SAAS - Set the bar low and features high -> $2/month gets you private lists, dedicated subdomain, etc. Make it so cheap that people just buy it/signup. Might want to focus on "prepay 6 months for $12" - so users don't feel locked in. etc. Have more features with the premium model like email notifications/alerts/bigger teams

2. Affiliate Ads - Focus on future partners/affiliates - think of your product as a gateway drug to a bigger platform for doing/development. Push affiliate products that are targeted towards developers as well as bigger products like asana or basecamp. Try other products that every person needs (dollarshaveclub/birchbox.com)

3. Kinda crazy but wonder if you could do something like http://www.launchbit.com - if users signup with email and leverage http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/ or https://www.rapleaf.com/ you could break out users and serve up newsletters around productivity and do joint ventures with other companies to test drive their products. Since most likely your audiance will be startup/dev community.

Anyway - just some thoughts
Ask HN: How do you explain the importance of handling sensitive data?
I work for an educational organization and one of the web-based applications that we use to support external users is provided by a third-party vendor and this application sends username and password information via email. Sending that type of information via an insecure channel like email is bad enough; however, my concern is that in order to send the password, the vendor either (a) stores sensitive info, such as a password, in plaintext or (b) encrypts data but has the ability to decrypt it. IMHO, either method seems less than ideal.

Here's my question: I'd like to educate key internal users (technical laypeople) of the importance of this issue (in hopes that they will be more educated users and/or pressure the application vendor to improve its application), and I'm looking for suggestions on what approaches I might consider. I don't want to get into the technical nitty-gritty of hashing functions, rainbow tables, salting, etc. but I do feel it's important to give these users some background information and things to look for when they're using/evaluating web-based (or mobile) applications.
The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software
Retargeted Facebook Users and the All-Day Conversion Effect
I guess it depends on how far that work has come--if what they have after a year is as good or better than webOS then OK, but if not, webOS worked pretty well for all its rough edges.

I guess it pains me for two reasons--I'm a big webOS fan (still use an old Pre 2), and I hate seeing smart developers spending time reinventing the wheel. Though in this case nobody could have predicted the path webOS would have taken so it's not like Mozilla had a choice until very recently.
Thanks for the explanation. Focus would definitely get in the way, since interpreting body language requires seeing many things at once.

I'll explain natural and intuitive by an example. In grade 8, I learned to juggle. Not well, but good enough. The process involved clumsily learning several motions and putting them together.

Now I can still juggle, despite years of not doing it. The skill, to the level that I trained it is intuitive. It no longer feels like many things, but just one.

Likewise, I learned to interpret many gestures. At first, I could only interpret them slowly, separately and consciously. Now I interpret them quickly, jointly and unconsciously most of the time.

Are there any skills you've acquired that can now run unconsciously in the background, or does everything require conscious effort and focus?

It sounds like the latter, but I'm curious how this works for things that require multiple separate actions, like driving, computer operation, cooking. Those feel like one thing, but really they're several smaller actions joined together.
I have no quibble with genetic modification. I have a quibble with a huge corporation that a) sues everyone back to the stone age and b) failing that, is highly incentivized to create new breeds with kill switches and phase the others out of the market.
No, plants which do this generally grow less on the sunny side of their stalk. They are putting more / larger cells on the far side, as a form of memory. A crude counting system, if you will - when side A > side B, side B is where the sun is. Arguably this is even more complex than a mere external memory system - it deals in continuous ratios, rather than booleans!